Due to rising health care costs and increased public availability of medical information, individuals have begun to monitor their personal health independent of medical professionals. A large number of households currently include at least one health value measuring device such as a scale, blood pressure monitor, heart rate monitor, or body fat analyzer. These devices are used to measure at least one value related to an individual's overall health. For example, a scale is used to measure the body weight of a user. Body weight is often tracked to determine if weight is gained or lost over a particular time period. Likewise, weight may be used to self diagnose degrees of obesity which are known to lead to a variety of health related problems. In addition to elective health monitoring, many individuals are required to measure certain health values as a result of one or more medical conditions. For example, a diabetic must monitor his or her insulin levels to determine when it is necessary to ingest or inject supplemental insulin. Likewise, certain heart related conditions require that a patient regularly monitor his or her blood pressure.
In certain circumstances, medical professionals may be required to routinely measure one or more health values to ensure that a patient is healthy. Often, patients that require consistent measurements must be located in a hospital or medical care facility to allow medical professionals to analyze the values. For example, in certain individuals, rapid increases or decreases in blood pressure may indicate a severe medical condition, which must be treated immediately. If a patient is disabled mentally or physically it may not be practical to accurately and reliably perform these measurements. To address this problem, various companies have designed devices and systems to allow for the remote monitoring of patients. These systems allow participants to measure their values and report them to medical professional via some form of communication device. This enables the medical professional to remotely review the values to determine if further intervention is necessary.
However, the existing systems fail to overcome many of the problems encountered in pursuit of accurate, convenient medical value measurement. Participants and patients are often still required to manually measure one or more values. Participants who are mentally or physically incapacitated will not be able to utilize this type of system because of an inability to operate the measurement equipment. In addition, participants may then be required to record the measured values and transmit information to the doctor. These tasks may also be problematic for certain disabled individuals.
In addition, conventional remote health monitoring systems are directed exclusively for severely unhealthy individuals. These systems are designed exclusively to transmit information to a medical professional for review. Therefore, there is no local interpretation of the measured health values. The only information provided to the patient is the individual measurements of each particular device.
Likewise, conventional systems are prohibitively expensive. Each of the measuring devices is often packaged independently of the overall system, thereby requiring independent power sources, user interfaces, and transmission systems. Thus, a user may be required to operate two or more measurement devices in order to provide the necessary health values for proper assessment. These devices are packaged in a manner that prevents or impedes their disposal in a particular tight location, often requiring independent storage. Further, conventional monitoring systems require an operator to install the communication link between the patient and the medical monitoring professional.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for a medical monitoring system that may be effectively utilized by both healthy and unhealthy individuals, minimizes physical space, minimizes overall cost, and is capable of reliably recording and monitoring health care value information.
It should also be noted that there is a recent increase in interest in the field of home automation and networking. Commercially available networking components have opened a door to a plethora of remote home control, computer networking, and other automation and control methods. A medical monitoring system can be devised to incorporate these features, becoming not merely just a medical monitoring system but a complete home control console. Such systems can benefit from a modular construction, expanding as needed to incorporate what features an individual user desires.